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speaks, as we ride in the open air in the bed of his truck, while Lilly drives alone in the cab, Pauly is holding my hand, and I am holding his.
    I do my part. “Psyched.”
    There is a pause. There is reality. I can read by the ripples spanning his forehead that my “psyched” sounded as unconvincing to him as it did to me.
    “I hope I don’t blow it, Oakley. I hope I don’t muck this up altogether. I can do that—as you well know. I can make a royal shit-hole mess out of things if I really try.”
    I hate to hear him talking like this. I mean, it is true enough. But I wonder if it might be less true if he wasn’t all the time suspicious of feeling good. “Stop it, Pauly. You’re not gonna blow—”
    “You know me, Oak.”
    And I hate it when he shifts it onto me. “No I don’t.”
    “Come on, don’t say that. You know me. You’re the one, the smart one, the clever one. The inside one. You gotta know me. Nobody else knows me. So if then you don’t know me it’s like, I don’t exist. Don’t scare me, Oak.”
    “I know you, Pauly. And I won’t scare you.”
    “Excellent. So tell me then why I do what I do so I can stop doing it.”
    “What did you do now, Paul?”
    He just shakes his head, squeezes my hand. He is awfully awfully strong, my Paul. “Just tell me the why bit, Oak, huh?”
    “I don’t know why, Pauly. That’s like a pyramids-of-Egypt question. Nobody knows where your thoughts come from, we all just stand back and go wow .”
    He likes that for a minute. Then he goes all quiet again. You know how, in roulette, you just keep waiting, and waiting for the wheel to come to a stop but it seems to just keep ticking off new numbers interminably … that’s what it can be like, on certain days, waiting for the defining Pauly moment.
    “This is the one, Oak. Today’s the day. This is it, you know.”
    “Is it?”
    “It is.”
    Lilly opens the small sliding window behind her head. “Do I know where I’m driving, or am just, driving?”
    Pauly doesn’t seem to have heard. He’s staring at the flying-by pine trees so intently, it’s as if le’s trying to count them all.
    “Just driving, I guess, Lil,” I say. “But it doesn’t matter, because this is it . Today is the day. It .”
    “Is it?” she asks brightly. “Is it it again today? Funny, the radio didn’t say anything about it this morning.”
    Pauly’s back in the conversation, and mad, which is fair. Then, he’s laughing, which is awfully good of him. “All right you guys, go on and zoo me. You’ll be crying though, when I hit one of these times. Maybe when you try and come see me after I’ve made it, I won’t even have security open the gate to let you in.”
    We all know what we’re doing, we just don’t know, except for Pauly, where. He got a painting gig for the two of us, through his uncle who is as of this month in the house restoration business. Next month he’ll be in the wholesale fish and sweat socks business, and probably so will we. Pauly is a huge student of Uncle Dizzy’s wheeler-dealerism. Every time we get near the guy, fame and fortune are close at hand.
    And Lilly is driving us for the simple but not so simple reason that Pauly likes to ask things of her. And Lilly likes to tell him yes.
    “Come up here in the cab with me, you guys. I’m getting lonely.”
    “Too crowded,” Pauly says.
    “You could fit six of us up here, and a six-point buck.” She has to yell to be heard, as she faces the road ahead and talks to the boys behind her.
    “I am getting kind of cold, Paul,” I say.
    “You can go,” he answers. “I don’t mind. I like the wind on me, though, so I’m gonna stay for now. I don’t feel cold, Oak. Really, cold doesn’t bother me.”
    Pauly has never ever been sick in all the time I’ve known him, and I’ve known him as long as I’ve known me. I, on the other hand, catch every damn thing. He says I get sick for both of us. So he stays in the bed and I stay in the bed with